Risk reduction in retail and restaurant quality assurance practices

Assuring the quality of the food and identifying its risks is an increasing focus for retail, restaurant and manufacturing industries, along with U.S. and foreign countries. In selecting the applicable quality assurance program, companies should analyze the risks, benefits and costs of the program. Quality assurance is gaining higher visibility as the many quality attributes of a product become more valuable to customers.

The lack of a food safety and quality assurance programs that fail to mitigate risks may lead to many problems. “The majority of the food withdrawals, rejections and recalls cost are not just from “worst case” recall scenarios where people fall ill and lawsuits occur. A large portion of these costs are created by internal reworking, commodity loss, inventory replacement, removing goods from shelves, lost sales and public relations/customer confidence repair. Increasingly, these losses are being spread across participants in the supply chain, including suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retail/services sellers, 3rd party labs and auditors.”